Comment by hackyhacky
12 days ago
> The agent has no "identity". There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination".
Dismissal of AI's claims about its own identity overlooks the bigger issue, which is whether humans have an identity. I certainly think I do. I can't say whether or how other people sense the concept of their own identity. From my perspective, other people are just machines that perform actions as dictated by their neurons.
So if we can't prove (by some objective measure) that people have identity, then we're hardly in a position to discriminate against AIs on that basis.
It's worth looking into Thomas Metzinger's No Such Thing As Self.
In my opinion, identity is a useless concept if there is no associated accountability. I cannot have an identity if I cannot be held accountable for my actions. You cannot hold an agentic system accountable- at least in their current form.
Okay, but what is accountability? I would argue that accountability is a social/cultural phenomenon, not a property of the entity itself. In other words, accountability depends on how other treat it.
For example, a child can't be (legally) held accountable for signing a contract, but we still consider children as having identities. And corporations can be held accountable, even though we don't consider them as having a (personal) identity.
Maybe one day society will decide to grant AIs accountability.
Maybe a better term would be “consequences”.
Children experience consequences every day. And the ultimate consequence faces us even from birth: our own mortality.
AI is essentially free from consequence. In my opinion.
Well, let me ask this: Does an AI (or at least an LLM) have an identity without a human to prompt it?
Without addressing the question you raise, I suspect that humans have an identity in a way that AIs do not.
Do feral humans have identity in the same way that humans with a normal development do? I'm not sure that's such an easy question. But certainly, "prompting" from other humans plays a very large role in shaping the way humans are.
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